Reflections: The Two & The One
Aeons ago . . .
. . . in the mountain vale
of Kashmir . . .
two moons . . .
crowning the central tree . . .
appeared . . .
a luminous riddle:
A God and a Goddess
are One . . .
Yet . . . the God knows
something Still
Unknown
to She . . . His Consort
who merely
looks on.
~
Centuries before
the God and the Goddess . . .
appeared
an earlier
riddle:
Paired companions,
occupy the same tree.
Of the two,
one eats the sweet fig,
The other,
not yet eating,
looks on.
Where birds unwinkingly celebrate
their share of life,
of the contests –
there He,
the splendid herdsman of all creation,
Wise (Soma),
entered me,
(before that) unrealizing.
Onto that tree,
honey-eating birds all alight
and mature.
Atop that tree
alone,
they say,
abides the sweet fig.
No one reaches up to it
who knows not the father.
RV 164 (20 – 22)
~
The Seers of the Rig Veda cognized riddles – enigmas. The above enigma, cognized by a blind Seer, Dirghtamas (Long Darkness), self-referentially enigmatizes the enigma-creating contests the Seers engaged in.
In that "tree" (of the contest) a master ("father") of the contest is teaching a neophyte ("son.")
Each of these two "birds" is a contestant or antagonist in the contest,
with each taking a position: either the "son's" position or the "father's" position.
Each position corresponds, respectively, to the candidate-for-vision's position
or the gifted-with-vision (master's) position.
Two birds, paired companions
companions ........... companions or members of the contest or symposium
paired ............... of the same brotherhood of speculative symposiasts
Occupy the same tree.
occupy the same tree ..... frequent the contest ground
Of the two, one eats the sweet fig.
the sweet fig .......... the goal of the contest, speculative visionary participation in the mystery of the brahman enigma proposed by the "father"
one eats .............. participates already in inspired vision (i.e., is at the latter, "father's" position)
The other, not yet eating, looks on.
the other, not (yet) eating, looks on ......... does not participate in, has not (yet) attained speculative vision (i.e., is at the former or "son's" position, having just entered the contest ground as a candidate, as yet unrealizing and uninspired in speculative vision)
Onto that tree the honey-eating birds all alight and mature.
Atop of that tree, alone, they say, abides the sweet fig.
No one reaches up to it who knows not the father.
Onto that tree .......... onto the contest ground
honey-eating ........... soma-drinking
birds ................ symposiasts, contestants
all alight .............. enter
and mature ........... and are transformed, achieving the inspired state
at the top of it .......... as the contest's culmination
sweet fig .............. is the goal of the contest (as above),
That [the Seer] Dirghatamas cognized the image of the tree to enigmatize this first context of Sanskritic philosophical thought was no accident, for in it he used an archetypal myth of the attainment of knowledge. The mythic complex of the cosmic or world tree, which is the tree of life or immortality, is basic to this notion of inspired, initiated knowledge. All the elements are there: the shamanic symbolisms of tree and bird, including an ecstatic journey to the top of the tree, and the initiatory symbolism of reaching the summit of the world tree to gain
the knowledge which, as the "immortal" sweetest fig, allows escape from both ignorance and death.
(Willard Johnson, On the ṚG Vedic Riddle of the Two Birds in the Fig Tree (RV 1. 164. 20-22), and the Discovery of the Vedic Speculative Symposium. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol 96, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1976), pp. 248 -258.
The scripture appearing on this site is the Vijñāna Bhairava. The translation (from Sanskrit into English) was a gift to me (a rather unknowing bird) from two knowing "birds," Swami Lakshmanjoo and one of his knowledgeable Kashmiri students, Pandit Dina Nath Muju.
The scripture itself is inhabited by two birds: (i) a waterfowl, the Hamsa, which resides in the tree of the Central Channel and in the subcontinent is associated with the Atman and (like jñāna itself) with breath, and (ii) a somewhat Buddhist-leaning Peacock, associated in equal measure, with a somewhat reified concept of shunyata, Vacuity – the Void.
The mystically breathing Hamsa occupies a higher position in the tree of the scripture than does the Peacock.
To enable his commentary on this scripture to endure down through the ages, Swami Lakshmanjoo left it in two forms:
(i) a series of videos gracing each verse, which over a few years, John Hughes of the Lakshmanjoo Academy recorded, and
(ii) Swami Lakshmanjoo's textual embodiment of the tapes, The Manual for Self-Realization: 112 Meditations of the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra (edited by John Hughes).
Both are treasures! In each, Swamiji comments on the scripture while responding to questions from his students. Swamiji emphasizes that the video version transmits his presence with a higher level of fidelity.
The highest position in the scripture is accorded to the scripture's first speaker, the Goddess, who speaks at length and well before even its first (Hamsa, 'Swan') mode of meditation is presented.
The Goddess expresses Her state of Unknowing to the God.
She realizes there is no way forward, that all conceptions of the way are mere mirages. They reek of mind, of mere intellect. Of givens, mere data rather than DA!
Did She ask Herself, as did San Juan de la Cruz, this question:
How do you go on,
O life,
not living
where you truly live,
being constantly killed
by the arrows
piercing you deeply:
your mere conceptions
of the Beloved?”
Did Her mind gives up, slipping away, unseen, with no other light nor guide than the fire, the fire pounding deep inside . . .
Her heart an open wound of love?
Unknowing is pathless. She is not a mapped-out, eyes-clamped-shut, statuesque take on knowledge. She is not a building up, like the erection of a theological system.
She is a licking away, a lingo of erosion, a flowing away, a scoop of ice cream melting on the tongue. She dances into each living moment: a djinn or genie flailing rhapsodically her thousand-thousand arms, pounding out silent heartbeats at full-universe scale.
She weaves for you, moment to moment, surrenderings woven of wonderment, of breathtaking awe, evanescing and swooning into awakening.
She teases forth your sensitivities to the impalpable, the un-graspable, as when trying to crunch an impossible math problem, your mind draws a blank.
Or when you have two dashing suitors but cannot decide.
Or when the Mandukya Upanishad insists that Truth cannot be grasped by mind.
In that moment of intellectual impasse – you surrender to unknowing, transcending all thought.
One of the premiere meditation teachings, the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, begins with Shakti’s frustration at not being able to grasp the essence of the scriptures.
Usually the active, dancing, dynamic half of the Divine Duo, She gives up, leaving Shiva, Her "better half," to annunciate all 112 ways of meditation.
Most readers do not see that she has already embodied the very means of transcendence Shiva will later describe in Verse 112:
When the mind feels frustrated
because it cannot grasp the meaning
of some book, or problem,
when it becomes a darned-if-you-do,
darned-if-you-don’t frustration,
with no way out,
mind gives up
relaxing
into
mental impasse,
aporia,
a state of blissful
unknowing.
When we recognize awareness as always already awake within its (and our own) ground state, as always already abiding as Divine knowledge, beyond mind . . .
then!
By giving up before the God even begins enumerating all the methods, the Goddess recognizes that by simply abandoning mind, She is the very essence of all the 112 meditations the God is about to present.
Shhhhhh! Don’t tell the God!
Don't mention that some scholars opine the scripture was penned by a woman.
After all, many of its ways of meditation are based on perceptions Kashmiri women enjoyed daily: bathing, for instance, in the shoreless ripplings across the heart of their awareness when absorbed within the dark hollows of a water pot or village well, or the luminosities within silence-haunted mantras such as Aum.
Swamiji was aware that the methods described in these verses are like the sweets a loving mother spoons onto her child's tongue to help the medicine go down.
Knowing of this "terrible medicine," as Swamiji characterizes it, is fundamental.
This so-called medicine is simply the difficulty of realizing that the meaning of the scripture, Divine Awareness, is not an object to be known, and that any mind attempting to know Divine Awareness mentally will – like a blind person seeking to know what one is touching – merely continue circling the elephant.
If Divine Awareness is not a knowable object of knowing . . . what is it?
Divine Awareness is simply one's own shoreless ocean of consciousness, not as Knowing, not as the Known, but as the Knower (Consciousness knowing Consciousness by means of Consciousness).
After all, if we are seeking to Know anything, we must first realize the Knower, the One Unbounded Ocean of Consciousness.
The terrible medicine is the realization that there is nothing one can do to know what one already is.
One's Divine Awareness abides beyond one's thinkings and doings.
The cure: thinking and doing less and less . . .
And, for the duration of many dozens of verses . . . the mind of the Goddess . . . showing no evidence of activity . . . remains silent.
When the mind remains completely still, however, its thought structures have evaporated.
It is as though the quiescent God, Her Beloved, and the lively Goddess, His Beloved, have reversed roles.
Suddenly, for the Goddess, there is nothing circling the elephant of her own Shoreless Awareness, Knower-Knowing-Known as One!
According to Verse 112 of the scripture, it is precisely within such moments of mental impasse, of Unknowing, that one recognizes one's own awareness as Divine . . . beyond thought constructs, fully enjoying the fruit of all the 112 methods.
▼▼⛛▼⛛▼▼
Religious Studies is not an autonomous academic discipline but draws upon other fields: anthropology, philology, linguistics, history, sociology, psychology, art, theology, semiotics, literary theory, music, and their deconstructions . . .
Sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists of religions may engage in research on the social structures underlying a scripture's mythological structures, including their theologically implied portrayals of gender relations.
Thus, if a scripture has one axis connecting itself with the reader, it has another connecting itself with a field of other texts.
These might include texts within the scripture's own genre as well as texts within the scripture's general cultural milieu, and well beyond.
For instance, some Kashmiri texts of the era (such as those of Kshemendra, who was in fact a talented student of Abhinavagupta) mention the limited freedoms and opportunities Kashmiri women of the Medieval era enjoyed, and some scholars surmise, as already mentioned, that the scripture itself may have likely been written by a woman.
If so, did the scripture's author countenance the similar types of gender-related challenges the famous Kashmiri poet and mystic Lalleshwari confronted a few centuries later?
Viewed dualistically, on the surface, narrative level of the text, we have a God, Bhairava (a then-popular form of Shiva), displaying his understanding of a tradition he embodies.
In fact, as Shoreless Awareness, He is thought of as abiding as the very essence of the tradition, with His discourse occupying most of the scripture.
As mentioned, we also have a Goddess, Bhairavi, his consort, who claims not to grasp the essence of the tradition's writings.
Viewed in a non-dual mode, however, these two mythic figures of that era represent two aspects of one Divine Reality: the God being the quiescent ocean of Shoreless Awareness and the Goddess the Creative Waves embodying that pure Mass of Consciousness.
When at the beginning of the scripture, the Goddess becomes fruitlessly exhausted in her attempts to think Her way into the essence of what She sees as Her objects of study – She simply throws in the towel. Or feigns to do so.
It is only after having given up, though, that She announces Her state of Unknowing, of having exhausted what She had considered to be Her only viable route to knowledge: the mind.
Had She, however, in the process, already relaxed into a state of mental impasse, of seeing no forward path: an aporia? A pathless path?
Astute readers may notice that the number of Verse 112 is identical to the number of the scripture's many ways (112), most of which Lakshmanjoo illuminates in his commentary. (Is Verse 69 similarly suggestive?)
We now know that Verse 112 informs us that a mental impasse can act as a path leading to the realization of Divine Awareness.
Verse 112 teaches that when the mind lacks the ability to mentally grasp an object of knowledge, the mind, in giving up, may dissolve into Divine Awareness.
Some readers may have concluded that having found Herself out of Her own depth, and having given up mentally, the Goddess's awareness must have, as the scripture itself describes, silently, subtly subsided into its own boundless self-referral state.
As Lakshmanjoo has pointed out in his commentary, this can happen when the mind gives up trying to comprehend and Object of Knowledge and dissolves into the Shoreless Awareness of the Knower.
Aporiae (the plural of aporia) are often followed by illumination.
Has the God even noticed that the Goddess – in giving up – has already, as per Verses 112 & 127, gone beyond thought, and thus fulfilled the aim of each of the 112 methods He is about to describe to Her?
Is the female half of the Divine Dyad only feigning ignorance? After all, the God, Her other half, is eternally one with Her, so "His" presentation of the means of abiding as Divine Awareness, is also "Hers."
Switching back to a dualistic perspective, if He did not notice Her state, it may be because the divinity of Her unknowing state is merely implied. Though She admits She cannot get to the essence of the tradition, the Scripture merely implies that She has in fact gotten to the essence as a result of Her mental impasse, by going beyond mind.
The scripture "tells" it "slant," to place it within Emily Dickinson's parlance.
Though the scripture may have been written in the 7th or the 8th century, it was not until the 9th century that Ānandavardhana, in his Light on Suggestion (or Implication), revolutionized Indian poetics with his insights into innuendo.
[A pertinent lesson on implication: When a woman asks her beloved if s/he feels a draft in the room, the meaning of the question is often not what the words actually denote on a word-by-word basis. It is not even a question. It is an imperative sentence. The real meaning of the sentence is something like the following: "Honey, please get up and shut the window." ]
Even before implication and suggestion had become officially and theoretically elaborated in India, scriptures and other genres of Sanskrit were not-so-quietly overflowing with gender-related innuendo and implication.
After all, often unnoticed, women everywhere, moonily amusing themselves within the relative obscurity of their creative grottos, have often secretly revolutionized their fields of endeavor.
One example is the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944) a revolutionary whose phosphene-like paintings have only recently been recognized as among the first abstract works in the history of Western art.
Much of her collection predates the paintings of the male artists credited as the originators of the movement – Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian.
Similarly, although men got credit for first walking on the moon, it was an unsung, unassuming female computer programmer, Margaret Hamilton, who actually had the "right stuff" to recognize the need for computer code that actually got those men to the moon and back – with nary a software glitch on any of the Apollo missions! In short, she goof-proofed the software.
If the Vijñāna Bhairava was written by a woman, it should not surprise us if its quiet and gentle gender innuendos venture beyond mere metaphor to pioneer powers of the written word that did not begin to frequent male-dominated Sanskrits until centuries later, when innuendo and implication began to actively form a new dimension in Sanskrit verse.
The God, while His consort remains silent, unfolds His array of meditation techniques like a courting peacock unfolding his tail feathers.
In fact, the image of the peacock is one of the most enduring in the Indian subcontinent, and beyond.
In Biblical times, King Solomon imported a peacock from India, all the way to Egypt. And when the Queen of Sheba visited him, she brought along her own retinue of peafowl.
Peacock courtship eventually developed into one of the most common tropes of romantic Indian monsoon poetry.
From the sastras, we learn that the Divine form presiding over grammar is seated on a peacock and that the thirty-two forms of Sakti corresponding with the thirty-two forms of Aghora Murti (a form of Siva) have as their vehicle the peacock.
The Siddhasabara Tantra describes the beings presiding over the letters ai, o, na, and dita as being seated on a peacock.
And so, take note of how, when the Goddess of the scripture confesses Her inability to grasp the essence of the philosophies of the tradition intellectually, the God of the scripture, as in the mating dance of a strutting peacock, begins spreading out His array of "feathers": his scintillating rainbow of mystic "eyes" reaching into infinities: each revealing to the Goddess.
Seen in this light, Verse 112 of the scripture is a "feather" focusing on mental impasse.
Another verse, another one of the "feathers," Verse 36, actually focuses on a peacock feather.
Is the creator of the scripture here gliding from mere implication into brazen hint?
After all, consider the following: in objective reality, peacocks dance before peahens by splaying out their tailfeathers, about 150 of them. (Just a bit more than the actionable verses in the scripture, though the total of method-related verses is considerably more.)
Among peacocks, this display is vibratory.
As the male dances, his feathers hum along at twenty-five cycles per second, causing the "eyes" of the feathers to appear as if hovering in space – vibrationally.
Scientists have recently discovered that, according to the laws of physics, the finer and more feminine feathers adorning the crowns of peahens' heads then begin to entrain vibrationally: in unison with the hum of the male's tail feathers.
This resonance often results in the creation of baby peafowl. And, as the tradition suggests in explaining the relationship between consciousness and its infinitely diverse expressions: all the resplendent iridescence of the peacock's tail feathers is present in nascent form within the yellow yolk of the peahen's egg.
Another kind of aporia that can lead to a mental impasse, and then illumination, is circular.
For instance: the relationship between consciousness and its expressions, unity and diversity, as well as the two-in-one relationship between Bhairava–Bhairavi are mirrored in the logic of a paradox formulated by the Indian grammarian Bhartṛhari.
Though the paradox is only one statement, it eternally vibrates back and forth between two semantic poles, giving rise to an endless interplay between two meanings.
The paradox reads as follows: Everything I say is a lie.
(Hint: If it's true it's false; if it's false it's true.)
It appears we cannot stop the paradox from oscillating, throbbing, pulsing from pole of one meaning to the other, and then back . . .
Further, Bhartṛhari's liar's paradox brings to mind the aporia inherent in Verse 133 of the scripture: the teaching that the whole universe (including, by definition, Verse 133 and the entirety of the scripture's other verses) is a magic trick.
When flabbergasted by a magic trick, only after the astonishment fades away does one realize it had been "only" a trick, an illusion: not at all "real."
Thus, if the verse is truly a trick (untrue), it is true. If it is truly true, it is false.
In other words: If this verse on magic applies to itself, then its statement that everything is only a trick is also only a trick.
If the statement is real, it's not real. If the statement is unreal, it's real.
And if the statement applies to all the other methods in the scripture, they are all birds of the same feather, vibrating back and forth between true and false, fullness and emptiness, just like Shiva and Shakti.
Neti Neti Nabobs Take Note
Not only do two pairs of birds (the Goddess and the God, the Hamsa and the Peacock) nest in the same scripture, two "birds" also indwell each of the scripture's 112 verses pertaining to means.
Each of these verses is inhabited by two stanzas: first, an unknowing, merely looking-on stanza and a second, eating-the-sweet-fruit of the tree stanza.
Each of the 112 unknowing stanzas pertains to method and usually begins by describing subtle experiential ephemerealms within in Medieval Kashmir's day-to-day reality (breaths, peacock feathers, monsoon nights, vast and featureless landscapes, deep sighs, caverns, and so on).
Then, in the second stanza, the verse will leap semantically to a mysterious referent – Divine Awareness: which is, for the unknowing reader, an Ungraspable fruit. An Unsignifiable fruit.
At times, for instance, the sweet Unsignifiable fruit is signified by the word Void, a Void pointing to the very purpose and meaning of each verse.
With each word we read in each verse, we are lowering ourselves, word by word into a deep cavern – and we realize, in a flash, we are stuck. You are stuck because neither the first stanza nor the second is going to deliver the sweet fruit of Divine Awareness to us.
When we realize this, we realize we can proceed neither up nor down. With respect to our goal of Absolute Truth, we have reached an impasse. Of course, we are free to nibble away on the sweet candy.
The first Stanza of each Verse refers to the Unknowing Bird, the second to the Knowing Bird, while the foundation of Knowing, the Knower, abides eternally in the gap beyond the two.
Breathing, imagining, sneezing, contemplating, walking about: all are words that have referents in the world as we know it.
Where, however, for seekers, resides, for them the referent to the expression Divine Awareness?
Seekers know only that, somehow, this elusive Divine Awareness, whatever it is, seems to abide some"where" as the very Meaning of every verse: indeed the Meaning of the entire scripture, and the Meaning of life.
Thus, if we truly knew ourselves as Divine Awareness, we would feel no need to study the scripture or practice its methods.
This brings up the question of which of the 112 methods to practice. Which piece of candy to select.
This question itself, however, according to verse 132, makes up another practice: of Ungraspability.
Luckily, another type of aporia arises when trapped in a paradox of choice, for instance: Which fellow shall I marry?
(In the above schematic representation, this type of aporia resembles an array of peacock feathers radiating from a single eye.)
And perhaps one of the most efficient and mathematically elegant ways of leaving all thought aside and residing as Shoreless Awareness would be to become so mired in undecidability when contemplating which of the scripture's methods to adopt, that the seeker settles on none: nunhood . . .
Although paradox often leads the mind to a state of aporia – a felt sense that the mind realizes it has no path forward – that is a good thing.
After all, the Goddess posing as one who confesses she is not able to understand the teachings of the tradition, leads to her better half describing the 112 ways for all of us non-Goddesses.
An aporia often precedes a sudden epistemic shift beyond mind – into spiritual illumination.
For instance, Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gita, was considered to be India's greatest archer. Yet, all of Arjuna's knowledge of the scriptures and of dharma did not prevent his mind from falling into a state of aporia, which preceded his spiritual illumination.
Arjuna was the unknowing bird sitting above the axle-tree of his chariot, with his "knowing bird" and cosmic charioteer, Krishna.
His illumination unfolded on the battlefield only when he laid down his bow in the battle between mind and heart, thus entering a state of pathless inaction.
Aporiae are universal. They indwell the Socratic method, especially in Plato's early dialogs.
MENO: Socrates, I certainly used to hear, even before meeting you, that you never did anything else than exist in a state of perplexity (aporia) yourself and put others in a state of perplexity. And now you seem to be bewitching me and drugging me and simply subduing me with incantations, so that I come to be full of perplexity. And you seem to me, if it is appropriate to make something of a joke, to be altogether, both in looks and other respects, like the flat torpedo-fish (narkē, stingray) of the sea. For, indeed, it always makes anyone who approaches it grow numb, and you seem to me now to have done that very sort of thing to me, making me numb (narkan). For truly, both in soul and in mouth, I am numb and have nothing with which I can answer you. And yet thousands of times I have made a great many speeches about virtue, and before many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway; yet now I’m altogether unable to say what it is. And it seems to me that you are well-advised not to sail away or emigrate from here: for, if you, a foreigner in a different city, were to do this sort of thing, you would probably be arrested as a sorcerer. [Plato’s Meno 79e-80b. From the translation of Berns and Anastaplo, Focus Philosophical Library, 2004, as quoted in Woody Belangia, "The Uses of Aporia, The Torpedo Fish Analogy in Plato's Meno," on the website Shared Ignorance: Towards a Defective Reading of Plato. The uses of aporia: the torpedo-fish analogy in Plato’s Meno | shared ignorance (woodybelangia.com) ]
Aporiae also indwell the philosophical methods of thinkers such as Pyrrho, Timon, Arcesilaus, Diogenes, and Sextus Empiricus. Sextus was quite explicit about the connection between skepticism and the aporetic method, arguing that the skeptic way be embraced as a way of life (agoge) or disposition (dunamis), and that the suspension of judgment (epoché) helps us achieve inner tranquility or peace of mind (ataraxia).
Anthropologist Michael Jackson explains how, in another realm, during the beginning of China's Sung dynasty, aporiae in the form of paradoxical words arose among Zen masters.
The T'ang period developed these in the koan: a mystifying puzzle forcing one to abandon mentation and open to new ways of (un)knowing – such as immediate experience.
Thus, the Goddess Bhairavi was not the only mythic female character to have experienced an aporia leading to illumination.
Another unknowing bird, among many such figures, was the legendary zen nun Chiyono: famous for having written the following no-nonsense poem, here pared down to its minimal core:
No water –
No moon.
The longer version involves a story:
CHIYONO [MUGAI NYODAI]
from Richard Bryan McDaniel: Zen Masters of Japan. The Second Step East. Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing, 2013.
One of Bukko’s students was the first Japanese woman to receive a certificate of inka. Her Buddhist name was Mugai Nyodai, but she is remembered by her personal name, Chiyono. She was a member of the Hojo family by marriage and a well-educated woman who long had an interest in the Dharma. After her husband died and her family responsibilities had been fulfilled, she went to study with the Chinese master. After completing her studies with Bukko, she became the founding abbess of the most important Zen temple for women in Kyoto, Keiaiji.A teaching story with no apparent basis in fact suggests that before coming to study with Bukko, Chiyono had been a servant at a small temple where three nuns practiced Buddhism and hosted evening meditation sessions for the laity. According to this story, Chiyono observed the people practicing zazen and tried to imitate their sitting in her quarters, but without any formal instruction, all she acquired for her efforts were sore knees. Finally she approached the youngest of the nuns and asked how to do zazen. The nun replied that her duty was to carry out her responsibilities to the best of her abilities. “That,” she said, “is your zazen.”Chiyono felt she was being told not to concern herself with things that were beyond her station. She continued to fulfill her daily tasks, which largely consisted of fetching firewood and hauling buckets of water. She noticed, however, that people of all classes joined the nuns during the meditation sessions; therefore, there was no reason why she, too, could not practice. This time she questioned the oldest of the nuns. This woman provided Chiyono with basic instruction, explained how to sit, place her hands, fix her eyes, and regulate her breathing.“Then, drop body and mind,” she told Chiyono. “Looking from within, inquire ‘Where is mind?’ Observing from without, ask ‘Where is mind to be found?’ Only this. As other thoughts arise, let them pass without following them and return to searching for mind.”Chiyono thanked the nun for her assistance, then lamented that her responsibilities were such that she had little time for formal meditation.“All you do can be your zazen,” the nun said, echoing what the younger nun had said earlier. “In whatever activity you find yourself, continue to inquire, ‘What is mind? Where do thoughts come from?’ When you hear someone speak, don’t focus on the words but ask, instead, ‘Who is hearing?’ When you see something, don’t focus on it, but ask yourself, ‘What is that sees?’”Chiyono committed herself to this practice day after day. Then, one evening, she was fetching water in an old pail. The bucket, held together with bamboo which had weakened over time, split as she was carrying it and the water spilled out. At that moment, Chiyono became aware.Although the story about her time as a servant is certainly apocryphal, the part about the broken pail precipitating her enlightenment seems to be based on her actual experience. She commemorated the event with these lines:
In this way and that, I tried to save the old pail since the bamboo strip was weakening and about to break until at last the bottom fell out. No more water in the pail! No more moon in the water!*
*Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, no date), p. 31.
Not having been born into Sanskrit, Paul Reps may never have been able to bask in the full sunlight of the Vijñāna Bhairava.
Rather, his renderings shine like photographic film exposed to moonlight: fugitive traces of lunar atmospherics brushing up against a bare, zen-sensitized membrane.
Reps' aesthetic sensibilities, even though mired within his Indic linguistic limitations, have something valuable to offer.
Sitting in Kashmir with Swami Lakshmanjoo as he penned his renditions of the scripture, it would have been impossible for the poet not to have immediately recognized a structural affinity between the forms of much haiku and waka and the structure of the verses of the VBT.
I say this because almost every haiku juxtaposes – at first glance inaptly and ineptly – two contrasting poetic images.
The two images seem not to compute . . .
my head
in the clouds
in the lake
. . . until they do.
The poem’s electricity happens when the lightning of awareness suddenly leaps into the Void between these two esoterically apt — but at first seemingly ill-paired — poles: like two bodies of two star-fated lovers bumping up against one another in a slightly dangerous nightclub.
The flash is like the moment we laugh at a pun.
When we laugh at a joke based on a pun, we forget about everything, roll on the floor, and time and space sort collapse into laughter.
In fact, zen poets, quantum physicists, and psychologists study puns (kake kotoba 'hinge words') as Classical World (Samsara) analogs of quantum world (Nirvana) phenomena.
In this way, similarly to how the great Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta paired rasa aesthetics with ontology and soteriology, haiku and waka verse commonly arrive at a haiku moment: an ah moment when the difference between Samsara and Nirvana collapses.
Each way presented in the VBT is similarly structured, similarly endowed with two disparate images: each dawning in the sky of its own stanza, illumining its own unique semantic horizon.
First, each of the practicum verses of the scripture presents a certain means.
Second, between the two stanzas, a gap.
And only third, usually in the second stanza, a leap pointing to the projected result of that means.
The nouns and verbs in the first stanzas are empirically familiar: pots to be gazed into, inhalation, exhalation, dark nights.
The referent of the second stanza, announcing the projected result, however, usually remains unknown to most readers, or they would not be reading the scripture.
Second-stanza signifiers do not, at first, resonate with their transcendental signified.
It is because of this, that Bhartṛhari's issue of nameability, of signifiability, arises.
The words Divine Awareness do not deliver Divine Awareness.
Until they do.
In this way, the semantic language game of the first stanza collapses in that of the second: consciousness endlessly playing hide and seek with itself.
Thus, the aporia. The mental impasse. Is the path of this magic.
Reps realizes, like Patanjali and the Sanskrit grammarian Bhartṛhari, that minimalism rests lightly on the mind, more effortlessly conveying the meaning-whole of a verse.
Many readers realize that neither haiku nor the verses of the VBT are really about the words on the page. They are about the meaning of meaning.
Those black marks on the page are scars of spiritual-aesthetic lightning.
Both in Abhinavagupta’s poetics and in the zen-inspired haiku poetics informing the Reps renderings, aesthetic experience can act analogously to unitive spiritual realization.
The flash of a haiku’s aha moment can be so vertiginously alluring, so suddenly illuminative and unitive that it flashes forth in the formless form of a mini-realization: a little piece of Samsara suddenly recognized as Nirvana, the realms of Classical Physics and Quantum Physics, as one. This is why some types of haiku use kake kotoba, hinge words (puns).
Structurally considered, then, much haiku and many of the VBT verses are founded on a similar aporetic compositional logic.
This aporetic structure primes the reader's mind to receive, recognize, and be these sudden, unexpected, illuminative flashes of awareness.
Consciousness, being both quiescent and dynamic, purely intelligent and dynamically creative, operates as something of a self-referential ruse – just like the waves in the ocean, which never cease being ocean.
Because Bhairava and Bhairavi are actually one, the Goddess's feigned ignorance and their ensuing dialog are (Rudric) ruses as well. Bhairavi moves the aporia from the realm of the verses to the realm of the scripture as a whole.
That mystery between unity and diversity is where the magic resides. Om is where the art is.
It is likely that Reps, with his background in zen, at times attempted to skew his VBT versions in the direction of the Buddhist school of sudden enlightenment.
In Shiva’s capacious triadic heart, enthusiasts such as Reps (and others) must be trebly thanked. The Reps translation, after all, was written for a general audience, not the specialist, and was a pioneering effort that engendered the English-speaking world's immense interest in the tradition, with many wending their way to Kashmir to find out more.
Divine Awareness (the Bhairava state), is simply oneself, one's consciousness, not as Thinker, but as Knower.
Again, if we are seeking to Know something, we must remember nothing can become the Known, without the Knower.
So, again, the first order of the day is to recognize oneself as Knower.
There is nothing one can do to know what one already is.
Because one's Divine Awareness lies beyond thinking, that awareness is immune to what one thinks about it.
There is no object to be known.
This "terrible medicine," as Swamiji deems it, is learning that we have nothing to do.
The medicine is terrible because, for most people, doing nothing is exceedingly difficult.
For instance, in this particular presentation of the scripture, the scripture's third mode of meditation, "Meditation 3," provides us with the scripture's first instance of a less-is-more, Shambav-upaya verse:
When the mind is silent and breath ceases to flow in and out, of its own accord it stays in the centre.
When most people sit quietly and close their eyes, however, their breathing does not still into quiescence but continues flowing inward and outward. The mind continues streaming thoughts.
For such seekers, Swamiji would probably prescribe a more process-oriented method.
For the nun William Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote the holy time is quiet as a nun breathless with adoration, Swamiji would most probably recognize that she is spontaneously on the right track and encourage her to continue.
As the scripture points out, one way of meditating is simply to do so on whatever brings one peace. Swamiji elaborates, saying that if one feels at peace in the garden, then going into the meditation room would be a sin.
In Kashmir Shaivism: An Exposition, Swamiji describes the role of these 112 methods as follows:
Any method, however subtle, can be only a result of a thought process—a product of mind. Hence it cannot touch that which is beyond thought, beyond mind. The mind can penetrate, at best, up to its own frontiers. Do what it will, it cannot go beyond its limits of time and space . . . A method implies duality—a seeker and an object of search, a devotee and an object of devotion. The ever-present, all-pervading, all-knowing Totality needs not to be beseeched or coaxed. It arrives unsought, like a fresh breeze from the mountaintop, when the mind is free from thought and seeking.
When an aspirant comes to the clear realization of this fact, the Shambhav-upaya (the method of Divine Will) becomes An-upaya (No-Method) or what may be translated as Beyond-Method. In this state of non-dependence and effortless awareness, there is neither acceptance nor rejection, neither justification for nor identification with any feeling or thought. In this void, the worshipper is the worshipped. This state is not beyond action and wisdom only, but beyond will, too. It simply is.
Knowing this—is the medicine that is difficult swallow.
So, as Swamiji teaches, this motherly scripture offers some sweets, some compensatory doings—some spiritual fiddlings, a suite of finite infinities.
The hope is that these sweets will gently, subtly wean one off of constantly doing and thinking and into the throbbing stillness of the embrace of Being.
Not that Mother intends for us to swallow her entire bowlful of sweets. One or two will do!
One good place to start is Chapter 2 of Self Realization in Kashmir Shaivism, entitled "Talks on Practice."
Aeons ago . . .
. . . in the mountain vale of Kashmir . . .
in the effortless ways lakes
reflect night's flow of galaxies . . .
a procession of yogic subtleties appeared.
These subtleties are not solid, stolid, mapped-out mental expositions.
They point not to concepts.
For they are She . . .
She Herself . . .
the Creatrix of the galaxies.
She
is not an unyielding,
orthodox, dogmatic,
eyes-clapped-shut mental being.
She
is not a building up,
like the erection of a theological system.
She
is Shorelessness . . .
a licking away . . . a melting . . .
a lingo of erosion.
Or snow-blindness . . .
bleaching away one's vision
of this world.
She
might be monsoon darkness . . .
eroding away forms
into a sable state
of shoreless union.
Her
roots do not fail . . .
for she is fast-rooted . . .
a dancing tree . . .
a yoga anchored neither in Sky
nor Earth
but in precisely no place
in particular . . .
dancing as
each truly living moment
of one's life:
a djinn
a genie flailing rhapsodically
her thousand-thousand arms,
pounding out silent rhythms
at full-universe scale.
A magician . . .
She
offers high-wattage . . .
fun . . . unfussy . . .
vertiginously alluring
gardens
of awe . . .
She
perceives the world
not as solid
but as a web
woven
of wonderments . . .
of breathtaking
astonishment . . .
delight swooning,
flickering, fading,
dissolving, evanescing,
into awakening.
She
teases forth
our sensitivities
to spirit-like impalpabilities . . .
ephemerealms . . .
She
beckons . . .
from within
the dark voids within
water pots
village wells,
the silence-haunted
tones
of the syllables we intone . . .
from the nothingness
indwelling
unending spaciousness
of blue sky . . . of
all-absorbing darkness . . .
of silences
before and after
lightnings . . .
from the black emptiness
within
the circles of peacock feathers . . .
from the boundless space
within
the heart . . .
from the gaps between
inhalation
and exhalation . . .
waves of mind
and their troughs,
before and after notes
of melody
as they fade
into nothingness . . .
before and after intense delight
and astonishment . . .
when being tickled . . .
and loved . . .
remembering
such joys . . .
or the warmth of reunions . . .
or when immersed
within sounds
of misty waterfalls
or rapid-running,
thunderous
rivers . . .
as waking fades
into sleeping . . .
the inner eye of bliss . . .
opens
or
when swaying
side to side . . .
bouncing up
and down . . .
when gazing
into void . . .
before and after
a bee’s prick . . .
before
and after desire . . .
when awed
by a magician’s trick . . .
at the beginning
and end
of sneezing,
sorrow
sighing,
keen curiosity
or hunger . . .
or when
intense devotion
melts
into union . . .
when confounded
by a puzzle
or aporia
'till mind
gives up
and reposes in silence . . .
Within each fading
away . . .
indwelling
each
of these unknowings . . .
struggling not
to refill
the veiled moon
with light
but
like darkly
turbulent
convolutions
of monsoon clouds
bleeding
into midnight's
layered veils, a blackness
fractured and interlaced
with deep, golden veins of electrified
now-ness.
Unknowing
being
a kind of monsoon cloud
an opening
to eternities
like a magician's
pauses —
wand poised
above
ephemeral
peanut
shell —
neither common legume
nor coin,
disclosing . . .
but
nothingness
poised
within all points
of all eternity’s
wondrous hatching . . .
For at Her best,
She
is neither stolid nor stonelike
but impish,
nymph-ish . . .
creation
in mid-chaos
and chaste stillness:
one more impasse
one more bloom
of lotus scented
with inaudible thunder
seeking ever new points
of suspension,
a yoga
of unknowing . . .
a certain negative
capability,
a capacity for drifting
within
the thin aether
of obscurities
uncertainties
riddles
aporiae
mysteries
doubts
near-nothings
fading away . . .
without grasping
after facts
and reasons.
She . . .
a yoga of voids . . .
of absences . . . blooming
up
between
the cracks
between tones
breaths
moods
moments
sips
states of consciousness
kisses
modes of being
ripplings of light
across the space of the heart . . .
between the patterns
of lisping patters
of rain . . .
with peacocks
piping
pea-pea pew-pew-pew
amid amorous effluvia
of monsoon downpours . . .
monsoon blackness
forever moving
folding over
within
her own utter
penetralia —
with pauses
within
her misty figurations—
dramatic
fractured
with fissures
lightning gasps
inter-undulatory naughts
abysses
ever-roiling within
convolutions
of awareness.
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Gaze
a few minutes . . .
into the triatic thundercloud’s convolutions, do you notice how haunting, how ghost-like figurations of presence, evershifting — arise? How "they" "present" "themselves" as erasings of all former "presences," while dissolving, as fresh new forms float into vision? How each so-called cloud depends upon and bears within Her forms the traces of past and future clouds? How — as soon as there “is” some “thing” to see "there," "it" will have always already been swallowed? How there will never have been any central configuration of roiling cloud that could be inked in with a capital C ?
How the only real presence — fleeting, among all these enfoldings, fading convolutions, pauses between waves — is pure, vibratory awareness — flashing?
How you assume a body of steam, a face of mist, a crown of unhurried lightning, crossing this cloudbank . . . entering this pause . . . ?
How — floating, frolicking, leaping between undulations — awareness swallows Herself . . . an ephemeral fish . . .
Gazing again . . . do you notice how . . . the less you grasp at these risings . . . these fadings . . . surrendering to their flow . . . how they rise and mist away . . . how fissures loom and flash forth within larger swallowings . . . formless, luminous, weightless?
Awareness . . . a fish leaping among the green body of river reeds, a poetics of mute thunder melting into the penumbra of a voiceless, formless silence, a Goddess of silence-haunted syllables, Her toes curling into rain, Her fingers entwined within your own.
As lightning . . . She appears from within clouds . . . born from rain . . . clothed in rain . . . leaping from fire to formlessness . . . within the central channel . . .
A gardenia hidden within cascading ebony tresses . . . Her eyes of rain . . . Her waist of water . . . Her embrace a current . . . She rushes into river . . . floating away . . . one night, O human child, with your heart . . .
To find Her — a thousand years ago — in May, hugging the Malabar Coast . . . lustrous, fresh blossoming . . . sandbanks white with masses of pearls scattered “there” by incessant waves . . .
As you sail the coast, lustrous, naïve young women lift up their questioning faces . . . and with rapt eyes . . . drain deep draughts from your heart.
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When cool, moisture-laden winds gush through your tresses . . . when sky darkens to peacock feather pitch . . . when solid sheets of water flood from sable, seething clouds . . . when the universe of vegetation sways and writhes in plundering embraces of monsoon winds . . . when lovers dip their quills . . . their hearts bleeding inky love notes . . . as amorous cumuli melt into one another in tumbling posesies of yearning . . .
As sunless daylight sinks into moonless night . . . maidens burn jasmine incense sticks which — dying — continue raising their ash-soft necks to humid kisses of night air.
Abandoned to monsoon darkness . . . to world-swallowing night . . . to darkness thick enough to touch — these maidens wonder . . .
Has the broad shadow of the body of some Divinity erased the world?
Has the sky, its soft . . . thundering folds . . . swallowed Earth with all her seas and mountains?
Fawn eyed . . . beholding only blackness . . . draped in sable silk . . . bodies scented with sandal and musk . . . necks agleam with black sapphire necklaces . . . ears dangling ebony peacock feathers, they steal away to their secret rendezvous.
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